Confronting COVID-19

Madeline Soskin, headshot
In the middle of her first year at Harris, as people began to understand the devastating impact the virus would have, Soskin and her friends felt a need to do something.
Pivot to digital
The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic forced the pivot from in-person to online learning with remarkable speed. Practically overnight, Harris Public Policy students and professors were logging into Zoom from homes all over the world.
A Zoom screenshot
After the Keller Center emptied out following the conclusion of Winter Quarter, Spring Quarter began at home. Throughout an unprecedented transition to virtual learning necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, a sense of community remained.
Center for Municipal Finance Executive Director Michael Belsky, headshot
Harris students and alumni “are energized by a problem,” Marie Trzupek Lynch said in comments echoed by the other panelists. “We want to dig our teeth into it and solve it. Problems for us are opportunities.”
A photo of the outbound elevated platform of the Clark and Lake CTA station in Chicago. There are a few people on the platform. Photo by KE ATLAS on Unsplash
A neighborhood in the top 10th percentile for uninsured residents has a test positivity rate that is 78 percent higher than the regional average, but a testing rate that is only 52 percent higher.
Nuro
Nuro, in a span of about two weeks, transformed its road-legal grocery-toting bot “R2” into a contactless transport vehicle for food and medical supplies at the coronavirus treatment facility that California created at Sacramento’s Sleep Train Arena.